


Soft & Tender

by daemoninwhite



Category: DCU
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sailor Moon Fusion, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, F/M, First Meetings, M/M, Past Character Death, Reincarnation, terrible meet-cute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-30
Updated: 2019-08-30
Packaged: 2020-08-14 01:33:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20184034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daemoninwhite/pseuds/daemoninwhite
Summary: Dick goes looking for his dream girl.Dick wasn't always Dick. He remembers what he was before. Now all he has to do is find the other reincarnated Sailor Scouts and everything will be better.





	Soft & Tender

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BehindTheRobinsMask](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BehindTheRobinsMask/gifts).

> If you read this on a site other than AO3 or Tumblr, it's been stolen! Friendly reminder that if you want offline reading, you can download right from AO3 itself.

Dick has been running around as Sailor V, putting his acrobatic past to good use fighting crime, for nearly a year when he overhears a guy gush to his friend about a break in at his family’s home that Sailor V stopped. It’s sweet, open and unabashed hero-worship is unusual on a guy of that age and build, and from the unsettled but fond look on his friend’s face, this isn’t typical behaviour from the guy. It’s the type of thing that usually makes Dick stifle a grin into whatever is handy, except.

Dick didn’t stop any robberies last night.

He frowns, tracks the men’s departure automatically. It’s not exactly like he can just go and ask around at the Scout Clubhouse if anyone stopped any robberies last night, crap, maybe he’s inspired some copy-cat do-gooder? And he can’t ask Kal either, since the cat took off around dinner time last night and wasn’t back yet when Dick left the apartment this morning. (Every now and then it reoccurs to Dick that he regularly asks for and takes advice from his cat, and he has to go and have a little lie down in a dark room for a while.) Dick hadn’t been worried, Kal is his own person, cat, whatever, but in light of this new information…

He swallows the rest of his coffee in one long chug, throws a couple of dollars onto the table and exits. He needs to hunt down Kal, needs to find out if some civilian running around in.

In.

In the armour of.

He stops. The person behind him doesn’t notice in time and nearly knocks Dick over as he pushes past. Dick’s deaf to the curses tossed his way. He stares blankly forward, puts two and two together and comes up with an answer that he’s been searching for ever since he started to remember.

The first time he slept after he rescued Kal, Dick started remembering what he used to be. He remembers being the princess of an entire planet. He remembers the feeling of Venus’ crystal twining through his soul. He remembers his friends, his fellow guards, his princess that he swore an oath to protect.

He remembers their final, hopeless, suicidal stand against the invaders. He remembers watching Ami and Rei die, separated by too many bodies to even try to help them. He remembers being back to back with Makoto, knowing that they were next, desperate to try and give his Princess one more moment to escape.

He remembers the look on Makoto’s face when he jumped in front of a blade meant for her.

He didn’t regret the action then and he doesn’t know. He regrets leaving her to face the horde alone, he knows that she was probably killed shortly after. Kal told him that Princess Serenity died in the attack as well.

As soon as he came to terms with the memories, as soon as he realised that he wasn’t going insane and that it was all real, he’d began searching. He’d walked every street in Gotham, took buses to every city within a day’s travel and explored them too. (He’d scared the crap out of his friends, who didn’t understand his sudden wanderlust and got understandably frustrated with him when he couldn’t explain it properly. He couldn’t, because it sounds crazy, it _is_ crazy, a talking cat told him that he used to be a princess of a planet that’s never been able to support life! If it weren’t for the way the memories make Dick feel, the way that he wakes up from dreams of his friends’ deaths just as completely gutted as he feels when he wakes from dreams of his parents, he’d write it off as a delayed nervous breakdown and move on.) He wanders foreign cities, searching for them. He doesn’t look a thing like he did then – hell, he’s even a different gender – so there’s no rational way he’d recognise her if he saw but, but he has to believe that if he looked into her eyes, no matter how different they’d be, he’d just _know_. 

He started transforming and wandering around, hoping that maybe his transformed appearance, being the same as it was then, might jog some memories. It was so weird, at first, it felt both totally foreign and completely comfortable in a way that made it even weirder. Then he’d started to get memories of training with the others, and he’d been unable to resist seeing if he could still pull of the moves, and the body began to feel just as natural as the one he’d been reborn in.

He’d been running across Gotham’s rooftops one night when he’d heard a woman scream, and she hadn’t sounded like Makoto had in that final moment, but that’s all he’d been able to think of, how desperate they’d both been for an impossible rescue, and so he can’t stop himself from going to hers.

One thing led to another, and he finds himself Gotham’s vigilante, Gotham’s protector, the pretty Solider of Love and Beauty and (unofficially) also of asskickery. He doesn’t give up his search for the others, doing that would feel like willingly cutting off a limb, but he does restrict himself to Gotham and occasional forays into Bludhaven, incapable of leaving the city for long. Kal thinks that if they were all reincarnated, and he wasn’t just accidentally spat out of wherever they were in the thousand years between the Silver Millennium and now, then they’d probably be pretty close together, and Dick agrees.

And now.

And now.

Finally, finally, _finally_ someone else has woken up.

That’s the only possible explanation!

Dick’s stomach twists and feels heavy and his throat closes up and he wants to laugh and cry and vomit and scream and he’s grinning so wide that his face hurts.

_It’s them!_

(He’s not alone!)

He grabs his phone and his hands shake so badly that it takes him three attempts to unlock it. ‘Sailor V + break in’ nets him a ton of old results and think pieces, but when he flips over to News, he hits the jackpot.

He clicks on the first link corroborating the guy’s story. His heart sinks when there’s no pictures of the other Scout, not even a blurry security still. He goes through a dozen other links, even goes to the second page of Google results, but nothing. All the articles say basically the same thing, and they all attribute the save to Sailor V.

“They’re here,” he whispers, ignorant of the way his eyes spill over.

He just has to find them.

\--

Turns out, that’s easier said than done.

He always seems to be one step behind, always late to the party, always playing catch-up. The first time he reads an article about multiple Scouts being spotted on the scene of a crime, he starts to cry so hard he has to sit down. He scares Barbara – even with the memories, she’s still his best friend, and sometimes he thinks she must be someone from Before because there’s just something about her that tickles the back of his brain sometimes, but she’s never said anything and neither has Kal, but she’s fierce and fiery and he knows that Makoto and the others will just adore her – and they wind up having a long conversation about emotions and communication and honesty. Babs leaves disappointed because he can’t explain the mood swing to her. It hurts, that he’s hurt her, but he can’t think of a way to avoid it. When he finds the others, once their reunited and he’s introduced his old life to the new, everything will be better; he’s always been the one with the best emotional intelligence, but Ami was a literal genius, and between the two of them, they’ll definitely be able to come up with something convincing.

It takes weeks, months, before Kal darts through his window. 

“I’ve got a lock-” Is all he gets out. Dick’s already transforming, magic sweeps over him and changes him into the Scout he once was.

There’s a full moon, huge and low, and Dick is going to meet the others again tonight.

He can feel it in his blood.

\--

He. He very nearly turns around when he arrives. He, he can’t.

They’re all there. Serenity. Ami. Rei.

Makoto.

They all look _exactly_ the same.

Serenity’s dressed in armour he’d never seen her wear before, and she’s so much more serious than he remembers her ever being. The person she’s fighting, there’s something about her, something that tickles the back of Dick’s brain, but he doesn’t recognise her. Even from a distance, Dick can sense the madness seeping off her. It’s not of her, it’s something outside, something was done to her, but it doesn’t make her any less deadly. She gets her arms locked around Serenity’s throat.

Ami counters with Mercury Aqua Mist and Dick curses when it covers his view of the battlefield as well. He creeps forward, trying for a better vantage point without alerting the others to his existence. He can’t tell if another body on the field would help or hinder. Rei and Makoto dart around to flank where the intertwined women were, and both launch reasonably powerful attacks. The woman does … _something_, Dick can’t see, he knows why Ami laid down some cover but he _needs_ to be able to see what’s going on! There’s some sort of pressure, wind, maybe, it rips through the Mist and Ami, Rei and Makoto are thrown off their feet.

They don’t get up.

They don’t get up.

** _they don’t get up_ **

A woman dressed in all black punches the woman holding Serenity hostage, tears her out of the woman’s grasp and pulls her to safety. Dick. Dick should care, that’s his Princess in danger, in one life he died to protect her. But.

But.

It’s his nightmares, all over again, Ami and Rei dead where he couldn’t help and Makoto with them, but this time he could’ve helped, he could’ve intervened and maybe they’d still be alive, this is his fault, all his fault, they’re dead and it’s his fault and

<strike>he would like to wake up now</strike>

He tears the Crescent Compact from his belt and launches it, doesn’t think, doesn’t hesitate, he’ll kill the person who took them away from him again—

The woman collapses to her knees and the Compact arcs back around to him. He goes to throw it again but she crawls back on her hands and knees and disappears in a puff of blue and pink smoke.

Dick jumps off the building and dashes over to Makoto. His hands shake as he rolls her over onto her back.

“Not again,” he whimpers. She looks just like she did before. “No, no, please, no.” He traces the familiar features, the face he’s been dreaming of for nearly a year, been looking for since he realised what the dreams meant.

He hauls her still warm body onto her lap, cradles her close and presses his forehead to hers, just above her tiara. He can’t stop himself from rocking slightly back and forth, or from crying.

There’s footsteps behind him. 

He should get up. He should report to his princess. But.

But.

Makoto.

He shakes and cries.

_Makoto_.

Pressure against his cheek – someone’s trying to separate them – but it’s from the wrong direction.

He opens his eyes.

He can barely see through his tears, but he’d know Makoto’s smile anywhere.

“I’m Jason now,” she says softly, barely any breath in her. 

She sounds exactly like she does in his dreams.

He laughs, a weak, wet hiccup, and he would float away if she wasn’t pinning him down. “I’m Dick.”

She snorts, a sound he’s never heard her make before. He sits back, wipes at his eyes roughly but refuses to be embarrassed. She—or is she in the same situation as he is? With a name like that… should he be using he?—shifts, and Dick instantly wraps his arms around them, helps them to sit up under their own power.

They pat his cheek and smile at him. It’s crooked and small and he falls in love with it.

“You’re not alone anymore.”

**Author's Note:**

> I watched both the original anime and the Crystal version of Minako’s introduction (holy shit, one of the videos I watched had them side by side, and she’s so thin in Crystal! It’s especially obvious when put next to the original. I hope it got better.) and picked which parts I liked best, and rewrote some others to be more in tune with the DC character’s personalities. Bruce, uh, isn’t exactly an emotional match for Usagi.
> 
> The Sailor Scouts don’t have “proper” names during the Silver Millennium period, they’re just Princess Mercury, etc., so I gave them their canon names, since they won’t be needing them during the fic proper. Dick obviously doesn’t know their current names, so he refers to them by the Silver Millennium names.
> 
> The Scouts have a Sailor Starlights situation going on, they’re male in their human/default forms and look like they do in their canon, but then they transform into the female Sailor Scouts form and look like them. Dick still refers to himself as male and goes by male pronouns the entire time.
> 
> I do have justifications for the casting choices, should anyone be interested.


End file.
